Review – Need for Speed Most Wanted Ultimate Speed Pack DLC

The Need For Speed: Most Wanted Ultimate Speed Pack DLC brings five of the most expensive, fastest and exotic cars ever created into an open-world racing experience. They each have their own races, their own times to beat, their own totally unique handling and some amazing sound.

To start you off, an 11th car appears on your Most Wanted list – the Hennessey Viper GT.k. You race your new opponent around beautiful winding roads, drifting each corner in your high-speed pursuit (there’s no way that’s just me), until eventually completing the race and smashing into the car to claim it as your own. The Viper may well present the most challenge of all of the Most Wanted cars, since only a flawless race will leave you victorious – that car can destroy almost anything on a straight.

The other supercars – the McLaren F1 LM, Lamborghini Aventador J, Pagani Zonda R and the Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse – can immediately be travelled to by the Autolog system, and have races of various difficulty to unlock upgrades. In total, the pack adds 25 new races and 70 new multiplayer milestones.

Returning to Need For Speed with a set of 5 new and incredibly esteemed cars really reinforces how amazing a job Criterion have done at making each car feel, sound and look completely different. Each exhaust sounds totally foreign and absolutely endearing all at once, but above all else they sound real. The new cars all look fairly exact, right down to the Italian decals on the Zonda, and they really, really make me wish I was a billionaire a few times over. Everything written in our original review still rings true in this DLC.

Sadly, driving things as fast as the Veyron Grand Sport Vitesse does bring up a problem that could previously have been ignored. With the cars in this DLC really cranking up the speed, it quickly becomes apparent that Most Wanted’s handling lacks sensitivity. Driving the new Veyron at even 150mph should mean that a slight tap of the wheel (or the toggle) will veer it where you want to go immediately and without much force, but it doesn’t. Even if you carefully swerve away from incoming traffic, the lack of realistic sensitivity in the steering means you’ll probably end up hitting it anyway. It doesn’t move you as far as it should or as quickly as it should, so it’s very hard to guess what obstacles you’ll actually manage to avoid.

With a group cars so fast that you can barely see after 10 seconds or so on a straight, this issue is almost intolerable. It means a lot of wrecks, crashes and unjustified losses because the game doesn’t seem to be able to handle the speed. At the very least, cars don’t become more sensitive the faster they go, as they should if they have power steering. Despite this, however, I certainly couldn’t stop myself from playing.

Overall, Ultimate Speed pack is a wonderful addition to an already fantastic game, and it gives you so much more to conquer. It’s a jaw-dropping selection of the finest cars ever made, and if it weren’t for a fairly irritating handling system, it would be the perfect DLC for an already wonderful game.